People not believing me. It's getting a little easier, but it's funny how people will say, "I don't think you can do that." Then you do it, and they say "That was great" and you say, "Well, I've got this other idea." "Naw, I don't think you can do that." So you do it again. When I said I was going to find the Titanic , no one believed it. When I said I was going to find the Bismarck , everyone believed it, and then I failed in my first attempt to find the Bismarck . So people expect you to succeed, but they don't want to stick their own necks out, and so risk-taking can be very lonely at times. You know that classic saying, which is very true: "Failure is an orphan, but success has many fathers." I'll tell you, when I'm most at risk, I look around, and there are not a whole lot of people there. But as soon as I succeed, they say, "We were always there." And I say, "Yeah, but 500 miles behind me."

Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. Doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.

When you’re working and you make mistakes, particularly when you’re young, you make discoveries because you do things that are inappropriate and wrongheaded, but within the wrongheadedness you find an unexpected way to go. These things are truly the breakthroughs.

So we had to take this special exam and I flunked it. Erv Upton passed it, and I was scared. I figured if I failed it, I wouldn’t have any chance of getting in. So I failed it beautifully. ... And so it was the first year of this general college, which gave an Associate of Arts degree after two years, and that was expected to be a terminal course. It turned out it wasn’t.

So, it was hard to fathom letting go. Age was part of the reason. We were both 77 at that time.

Oh, I have a lot of pleasures. I love the being outdoors. I love fly-fishing, particularly for salmon. I love to ski.

One person that is my role model is my father. ... He’s a man who taught me something very important. And that was — give back to society what you’ve taken out.

My father tried to make me think twice. "Son, calm down," he said. "Stick it out."

I also developed an unhelpful aversion to asking for favors. Frankly, if I had sought help from others, I would have made far fewer mistakes.

I had a teacher who was a great influence on me, when I was in boarding school at Loomis, Jim Wilson. He was my economics teacher and he was also my dorm head. I didn’t know what economics was before I took this course. I was really moved by the course. I was moved by him. That’s probably one of the reasons I chose the field of business.